by Tim Wynveen
The stream of faces flowed toward her and enveloped her, people she saw at the office every day and those from town she hadn’t spoken to in years; her students, some of whom had careers of their own; clients who’d stuck with her through two or three home purchases and now were more friends than business; Ross Pettigrew and Janice Young; Ruby, of course, and the ladies from her church group; and lastly, standing off to the side and waiting until everyone else had given her a hug, her baby brother, Cyrus. She ran to him and hugged him tight and whispered so that no one else could hear, “You son of a bitch.” Tears were running down her cheeks and smudging her mascara, but she didn’t give a damn because it was her birthday, her fortieth, and people could call her a sentimental old fool if they wanted. It was true.
The Ramblers chose that moment to kick into their first number of the night, “Let the Good Times Roll,” and people easily slid into the groove. The wine and beer began to flow. The food came out from under wraps. The volume and temperature and energy rose in equal measure, and the night moved inexorably into memory.
At the end of the party, Hank was so drunk it took both Cyrus and Izzy to get him back to the trailer and into bed. When they were sure he was safely tucked away, they walked to the pond and sat on the bench there. Cyrus clasped his hands behind his head and stared up at the stars. Izzy watched a pair of mallards cruising the water’s edge.
“How’s the job?” she asked without inflection.
“You know, shitty.”
“Did the doctors tell you when you’ll be able to play again?”
For the first time, he gave full voice to the dark knowledge that had been shifting around his head for months. “I’ll never play again, Iz. Not professionally. They’ve done all they can, I think. The guy in physio said I should get used to the idea that it’s downhill from here. Considering the damage done and the operations, he figures that arthritis could kick in any time.” He shook his head. “It already hurts like hell most days.”
Izzy thought a moment, then began to talk to him about money, about Ruby’s generosity with Hank and the likelihood she would help Cyrus. She mentioned the rental money from Orchard Knoll, how half was going to Hank and the other into a bank account for Cyrus. “I can give you a cheque tomorrow, if you like, or whatever you want to do.”
He nodded his head, feeling both embarrassed and appreciative. Desperate to change the mood, he said, “Now that you mention the orchard, I can’t believe you’d let the place go that way. You know how Clarence was. It’d kill him to see it.”
She looked down at her lap and tried her best to explain. Lack of time, she said. Lack of knowledge. In the end, thinking of the damage that could be done, she had felt it was better that no one work the place.
Cyrus knew his uncle had felt the same, and was sorry he’d darkened Izzy’s mood with his complaints. Hoping to make up for it, he told her he would take on the responsibility of finding the right person to manage the farm. He had booked time off work, he said. He could spend the next few days talking to people. The longer they let it go wild, the harder it would be to get someone interested.
Izzy got to her feet and tossed her keys in the air. “Want me to drive you over there?”
He shook his head. “I told Janice I’d stay here tonight. I’ve got a feeling Hank might need a little help tomorrow.” Isabel laughed and touched his arm. Then he watched her drive away. But the moment she was gone, he wished he had asked her to stay longer. They hadn’t talked for ages.
The air was warm, and the heady smell of the lake was like a drug. Aside from the stars and moon, there were no lights anywhere that he could see, no sounds other than the tremulous shudder of a screech owl in the distance.
Full of nervous energy, he got to his feet and strolled out to the Marsh Road. There, he could hear things stirring in the ditch, a raccoon, maybe, or a skunk. And without thinking, putting one foot in front of the other, he moved smoothly into his recurring dream and began to run down the middle of the road. It took no effort at all to imagine his father there with him, the soundless strides as though his feet didn’t touch the ground, the way he seldom seemed out of breath or even really trying. And just the way it happened in all the dreams, Cyrus left his father behind, or rather, his father stopped running and let him disappear down the road on his own. He passed the Van Vessens’, the Wiebes’, and ran down to the bend where it joined the Lake Road. He cruised by the “Gold Coast,” ticky-tacky cottages on postage stamp lots, and across Roxy Beach where the sand was as fine and white as sugar. He ran without breaking his stride, even when he hit the water, the sand there so hard and rippled you could drive a car on it. He ran through the shallows, almost losing his balance but not quite, on and on into deeper water, sending up a fountain of spray until he was up to his waist. And without pausing to think, he leaned forward into a crawl and swam out beyond the breakwater to bob in the larger waves.
JANICE WOKE WITH A START, knowing something had just happened but not knowing what it might be. She clutched the blankets under her chin and tried to slow down her heart. Listening carefully, she could just make out the drip of water. Then one of the shadows in the room moved toward her and touched her with an ice-cold hand. “It’s me,” Cyrus said. “Rise and shine.”
The horizon had begun to colour. It would be an hour at least until sunrise. The room smelled of lake. “Come to bed,” she complained. “It’s too early.” But when he knelt beside her and hugged her, she pushed him angrily away. “Rotten thing to do,” she muttered, drying her face on the blankets.
“Just water,” he said. “It won’t kill you.” He hugged her again, and this time she didn’t recoil but relaxed into it, sought further contact with his cool wet skin. “It’s taken me a while to figure it out,” he said. “I’m slow. I’m stupid. But it’s finally starting to sink in that we should get married.”
Janice grew still, the silence deepening with each beat of her heart. She untangled herself and sat back. She looked out the window, then up into his eyes. “And then what?” she asked.
He folded his arms, suddenly on the defensive. “I don’t know. That’s the only part I’m clear about. I think we should get married.”
She pulled on her housecoat and dragged him to the front steps where they leaned together, the world around them gradually taking form. “This is what I know,” she said. “I’ve lived here and in Toronto, and maybe someday I’ll live somewhere else again. I’ve been single and I’ve had a relationship I thought would last my whole life. I’ve had periods when I’ve been surrounded by friends, and times when it seemed I had no friends at all. And you know what? When I think about what’s important to me, when I think of the line that runs through my life, it really comes down to one thing—my work. So when you come to me all of a sudden talking about marriage, and you’re dripping wet like you’ve just been baptized in some new religion, I get worried. I’ve seen you get carried away before.”
Cyrus nodded soberly. He knew he deserved as much, but that didn’t make it less hurtful. He also knew from bitter experience that few dreams last a lifetime. She was looking at heartache if she thought this career she loved so well would carry her to her final days. He had lessons to teach her on that score. Without looking up, he said, “Is that your answer?”
Janice thought about her time with Jonathan, about the few disastrous affairs she’d had since then, about the many nights she had crawled into an empty bed and wished she had Cyrus in her arms. Then she looked at him and said, “My answer is this: I don’t want you to go back to Toronto. I want you to stay here in Wilbury. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe I want you to stay here with me. But I don’t want to marry you—not right now at least. I think we should take it one step at a time.”
She squeezed his hand. He sat in stony silence, looking at the horizon. Finally he said, “I’m cold,” and walked into the house. When she followed a few moments later, he was already in the shower. She tried the door, but it was locked.
DURI
NG THE NEXT TWO DAYS Cyrus met with as many farmers as he could. Men like Ernie Bell, who had no apple experience, were eager enough to take on Orchard Knoll but were just too clueless. Those who knew about apples expressed no interest at all. Wade Dobbins over at D&B Orchard put it down to a sign of the times.
“Wouldn’t make much sense our taking on your acreage,” he said, pushing back the brim of his peaked cap. “We’re pulling out half our trees as it is. Not worth our while. Now if the damn bureaucrats up in Ottawa would do something about these cheap imports, we might stand a chance. But the way it is, it’s hopeless. We’re putting in cherries instead. You might want to go that route, too, Cy.”
As much sense as that might make from a business perspective, the thought of pulling out a single tree seemed a crime. He would, he realized, just as soon chop off his own hand as cut down one of them.
His other dilemma, Janice’s refusal to marry him, was much more troubling. They had continued to sleep together but, by tacit agreement, there was little contact. On the third night after his proposal, however, their unspoken pact broke down and they made love almost desperately, as though they both feared it might be their last chance.
The next morning he awoke alone, after his first solid sleep in weeks. The sun was up and he stumbled out to the kitchen. There was a half pot of coffee. A clean cup, saucer and small breakfast plate were on the table. Janice’s dirty dishes were in the sink. Her car was still in the driveway. Peering out the low windows of the laundry room, he could just make out her silhouette in the shed. She was already hard at work.
While he dawdled through breakfast, his thoughts bounced back and forth through time: wondering about his future with or without Janice, remembering the smell of Ruby’s kuchen and the sound of Clarence’s tuneless humming, probing the aches and bruises from his life with Eura, occasionally pausing in the present to contemplate the luxury of a day off from Dominion Optical. His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone.
“Is this Cyrus?”
“Yes.”
“This is Billy Maddux. I was phoning about guitar lessons?”
Cyrus looked at the receiver with disbelief. Then he said, “No lessons here, kid. Bother somebody else. Where’d you get this number anyway?”
“Was on the ad. Maybe I dialled wrong. I’m sorry …”
“Ad? What are you talking about? What ad?”
“At McCready’s. On the bulletin board there.”
McCready’s was the new music store in town, the kind of place that Cyrus could only dream of when he was a kid. But he knew just the sort of ad the boy was referring to: a small typed notice with a phone number repeated on several detachable tags. It would be tacked on a corkboard with a thousand other notices announcing lessons, equipment for sale, musicians at liberty.
The boy continued. “Said to call Cyrus at 555–2134.”
“Well that’s the number, all right, and my name is Cyrus—”
“ ‘Lessons from a rock star’ is what it said …”
Suddenly it all made sense. It was Hank’s doing. He’d gone downtown and put an ad in McCready’s, the idiot. Cyrus clucked his tongue. “Sorry, kid. Somebody’s practical joke.”
A few minutes later he wandered out to the shed. When Janice saw him in the doorway, he said, “I can’t believe how good I feel.”
“Me too. It’s a beautiful morning.”
He jammed his hands in his pockets and half-turned so he could see the sunlight and blue sky and acres of trees. Without looking at her, he said, “I wish I could always feel this way.”
“You can try.”
He wandered idly around the shed, picking up tools and putting them down again. “Need any help?”
“Well, there is one thing you could do for me. You could get lost, Cyrus. I’m trying to work.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She hugged him with all her might and pushed him toward the door. “Call me for lunch. You keep telling me what a great cook you are, maybe you could show me a little more proof.”
He drifted back across the yard. Before he went inside, he inspected the apple tree near the corner of the house, the one on which he and Izzy and Clarence had grafted three new buds to symbolize the union of the two families. It was in no worse shape than the other trees he’d inspected, but this one was special, so he returned to the shed for Clarence’s bow saw and his heavy-duty shears.
Clarence didn’t follow a lot of the common wisdom about apple trees. He thought it was wrong to prune only in late winter. Nor did he think topping trees was a good idea. It made them bolt and waste a lot of energy. In most ways, he said, an apple tree was like a person. It needed space and light. It needed to be protected, and when it got sick, it needed someone to care for it. It needed grooming and could not be expected to carry the full weight of its burden without some kind of help. “You can always trust a nice-looking tree,” he liked to say.
Cyrus circled the tree a few times to confirm his first impression. Then, angling in to the trunk (both Frank and Clarence had advised him to prune from the inside out), he searched for a place to begin. It wasn’t easy. He had always found it difficult to make that first cut, to limit growth and creativity however undisciplined.
Start with the obvious, Clarence had told him. Broken branches, split branches, branches that are causing damage to others. And so he did, one cut leading to the next with surprising ease until the tree began to open up, creating corridors of light and air where fruit could flourish. It was pleasant work. His muscles were humming. His mind was clear and focused. When he finished, he returned the tools to the workbench, then gathered the pruned branches together, three big bunches, and carried them over to the woodpile behind the shed, amazed at how much a tree could do without. As he walked back to the house, he stopped to admire his work one last time. To the untrained eye, the tree would now appear stunted and unnatural, but Cyrus knew it was a better tree than it was before, stronger and healthier and more likely to express its genius.
When Janice came in for lunch, he made grilled cheddar-and-tomato sandwiches (one of Sophie’s specialties), which they ate outside on the front porch. After that they made love once again, then went for a long walk along the Marsh Road. Around five o’clock, he drove downtown to Izzy’s office, where he found her alone doing paperwork. Without a word of greeting, she said, “How’s the search going for a hired hand?”
He slumped in the chair opposite. “Haven’t found anyone who knows even half as much as I do.”
“Well, the job’s yours if you want it.” She scribbled something on a document and then looked at him over the rims of her reading glasses.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“Well, no, neither did I. I was joking. Or maybe not. Why don’t you think about it—at least until you know about your hand.”
“I know about my hand. Besides, I already have a job.”
But even as he said the words, he knew something was changing. During the past few days there’d been a feeling of suspension in the air, like those old spider chords Sonny used to play that stretched out in every direction and acted as a bridge to another key or groove. He got to his feet and said, “I’ll keep looking.” At the door he turned and added, “It’s great, you know, what you’ve done for Hank.”
She removed her glasses and rubbed her weary eyes. “Po Mosely, for Christ’s sake. That was all his doing.” Then leaning back in her chair, she shook her head and smiled. “Ever think your life would end up like this?”
He looked out at the main street of Wilbury, over to his middle-aged sister, streaks of grey beginning to colour her hair, then down to his mangled hand. “I guess I never thought about anything much at all, Iz. But I was always afraid I’d wind up back here sooner or later, burned out or washed up.”
“You’re not a failure, Cy.”
He took a step back inside the room and leaned heavily against the door jamb. “I don’t know what to think about any of that. Maybe I am, maybe
I’m not. Maybe I’m about to find out.” He thought about Clarence and how clear and unified his life had been. He thought about Jim and his many transformations. Then he said, “Let’s you and me do something. Go to Hounslow maybe. I’ll buy you dinner and tell you my whole sad story.”
Instead they ate pickerel at the golf club and talked until midnight, filling in the blanks of the past twelve years. Afterwards, he dropped her at the office where she’d left her car. Then he drove on alone to Lake Isabel, believing that the two of them had established a connection at last, that after a lifetime of awkward negotiation, they had finally found a groove.
Hank was sitting alone at the pond with the National cradled in his lap. Cyrus walked up beside him and stood admiring the full moon. A jet soared high overhead. Nearby there were crickets, and out on the water the same two mallards. Hank plucked an open string—pling, pling, pling—then let his arm hang limp at his side as the final note rang out. Staring straight ahead at the pond, he said, “I did it, you know.”
Cyrus was confused by the bleak tone of voice. He said, “I know, Hank. You should be proud of yourself. You’ve got a great set-up here.”
“I mean a long time ago. That guy. At the gas station. I did it. I killed him. I told you I didn’t do it, but I did. I killed him. I’m guilty.”
Cyrus swallowed hard, tempted to tell his brother that no one had ever believed he was innocent. Instead, he took a deep breath and said, “That was all a long time ago, Hank. You’re not guilty anymore.”
His brother looked straight at him now. “I’ll always be guilty, kid. Always. And I’m not complaining. I deserve that. It’s the way it should be. I just wanted you to know.”
“Well, Hank …”
“I mean, I wanted you to know, I guess, that I’m sorry.”